[Notes from provided lecture notes and other research as lecture was hard to follow]
Objectives
- Deluze and Guattari draw emphasis to the constructed and contingent nature of social reality
- All social life as a construct that keeps changing and reconstructing itself
- Form of thinking in social life, moved into psychological realm
Introduction
- D philosopher and G a psychiatrist, hugely influential in numerous fields
- Collaboration worked against backdrop of student protest in Paris in 1968. Attempt to directly challenge the French state led to a reassessment of the role of the activist in society
- D and G - A thousand Plateaus - book that this lecture is about - each chapter is a plateau - about a particular set of circumstances brought together in an intensive relationship
- Tried to re-think social change
- Project a revolt against traditional modes of thought, which they identify with a 'tree-like' structure
- Tree-like thought: one line of argument must lead to another, branching out in a structured manner
- Thinkers such as Kant and Hegel, whose ideas such as the sovereign subject of thought, universally valid reason, and the moral good continue to shape contemporary social life
- D and G conceived an alternative structure for thought that privileges difference, play and creativity: rhizomatic thought
- Multi-disciplinary practices are brought into a state of play, and concept are re contextualised and reverberate together
Rhizomes
- A rhizome is an underground stem that grows horizontally and pushes up lateral shoots
- The rhizome is an alternative model of thought to the tree like structure of thinking
- Claims are no longer linked in a continuous vertical progressions towards a conclusion, they are linked through leaps of association and the relation of seeming unconnected ideas
- D and G emphasise that concepts are not waiting for us but they must be invented. Each one contains components that come from other concepts, and also links up with these others in a state of mutual support, co-ordination and articulation
Saussare Diagram
- Refer back to the concept of the signified
- This mental concept is produced through an agreement between users of a given language system
- The concepts that we use in thought and speech gain their meanings purely from a repeated pattern of contextual usage between different language users
- Individual words, such as dog, gain their meanings from agreements between people that this word and no others refer to this particular animal
- D and G's notion of the rhizome draws upon the interconnect nature by which meaning is constructed. The rhizome builds relationships between objects, places, peoples and ideas, generating unanticipated commonalities between seeming disparate entities.
- Rhizomes are creative and may be intentional or unintentionally produced
Isa Genzken
- Multi-disciplinary practices are brought into a state of play, and concept are re contextualised and reverberate together
Rhizomes
- A rhizome is an underground stem that grows horizontally and pushes up lateral shoots
- The rhizome is an alternative model of thought to the tree like structure of thinking
- Claims are no longer linked in a continuous vertical progressions towards a conclusion, they are linked through leaps of association and the relation of seeming unconnected ideas
- D and G emphasise that concepts are not waiting for us but they must be invented. Each one contains components that come from other concepts, and also links up with these others in a state of mutual support, co-ordination and articulation
Saussare Diagram
- Refer back to the concept of the signified
- This mental concept is produced through an agreement between users of a given language system
- The concepts that we use in thought and speech gain their meanings purely from a repeated pattern of contextual usage between different language users
- Individual words, such as dog, gain their meanings from agreements between people that this word and no others refer to this particular animal
- D and G's notion of the rhizome draws upon the interconnect nature by which meaning is constructed. The rhizome builds relationships between objects, places, peoples and ideas, generating unanticipated commonalities between seeming disparate entities.
- Rhizomes are creative and may be intentional or unintentionally produced
Isa Genzken
- Isa's sculptures can be considered as rhizomatic artworks. Her work reflects the chaos of the urban landscape, yet can look like small scale skyscrapers. Objects, images and poured paint collide, creating formations that suggest future architectural production. Materials, images and ideas collide suggesting possibilities for the transformation of urban space.
Assemblage
- D and G developed the notion of assemblage to address how conventional meanings and practices become fixed
- The use of this word comes from the french word agencement, the meaning of which emphasises processes or arranging, organising and fitting together.
- Assemblages emphasise the convergence of heterogeneous (lacks uniformity) elements such as food and furniture
- An example of an assemblage is the place we make our home - a home is a way in which we make a space express comfort to us
- D and G describe a child alone and afraid of the dark, the child hums or sings a tune as a way of bring familiarity to a place
- Home is not a pre-existing space, it is not necessarily in the house, it can be anywhere
- The literal meanings of words are always accompanied by assumptions of value, power and authority
High School Diploma
- Pre-supposed in the statement of a high school diploma is a relation of the power between the principal and the student as the bestower and receiver of knowledge
- Implies a debt to be repaid by the student as society has spent a long time on the student so they now need to go and get a job
- The role of words like "i" and "you" shift back and forth between people in conversations - also serve as a form of identification
Good Boy, Bad Boy
- Videos of a man and woman who face the viewer repeating statements that continually change through the substitution of an individual word. Variations are with words such as "I", "you", "we" and "they" and they change the roles between the accuser and the accused
- Language is not just about the transmission of messages, it places you under obligation to reply
- Simple language imposes a rule upon the language user, and forces them to accept the presuppositions of value power and even prejudice.
Hoodies
- The term hoody has come to signify both a hooded sweater and a person wearing a hooded sweater with the hood up. Links to criminal activity, a person wearing a hoody is usually considered to be up to no good. Employing the pre-suppitions of the language system
- Assemblages of all kinds operate within a territory
- Situation - a group of kids in hoodies outside a supermarket - they form an assemblage of bodies that is coded in relation to a series of judgements to passers by. One might assume what they are plotting to do. They make people nervous. The trolley park is no longer just a space, it is re-terrotorialised as a space of social interaction and danger. It has been subtracted from the supermarket territory.
- The process of de-terrotorialisation and re-terrortorialisation is continued. They occur within assemblages with the flows in which their component parts move at different speeds.
- How the assemblages are judged can change with media reporting etc
- Different social constructions change at different rates, and this affects how assemblages form and shift
- For example, that status of teenagers in society can change very quickly
Zaha Hadid
- The architect Zara Hadid expresses such assemblages through architectural forms
- The structure of the building is conceived in relation to the spatial flows that structure the district of Rome, which the architect de-territorialises into architectural forms.
Subjectivation
- People are caught up in these developments
- The process of subjectivation: individual bodies are buffeted around these social assemblages - from school to home to work - and in a continual immersion in social activity - reading other peoples approval or disapproval, by selecting interests or passions or having them prescribed by others - a subject is produced
- D and G consider we were constructed through subjectivation
- The subjects recognition of itself is an after effect - "I" is empty but a means of self-reference
- Society produces subjects
- Ideology - systems of beliefs, images, values, and techniques of representation in which particular social classes conflict with one another
- Ideology shapes how we view ourselves and our place in the world
- Multiple ideologies circulate within any given society at one time, yet some are able to dominate as they reflect the dominating classes interest
- Social institutions such as the church, school, the family etc reproduce ideological formations, which serve to maintain the state in its existing form, by reflecting the ideology of the ruling class
- Such institutions are identified as ideological state apparatuses, which serve to re-produce and re-enforce dominant ideologies. Such apparatuses form the material contexts that integrate individuals into a range of social practices that are conducive to maintaining existing class relations.
- These ideological state apparatuses serve to reproduce the presumptions of the language that code material contexts and the roles of individuals within them.
- As people navigate these different contexts they are led to take on different identities that are deemed appropriate to them, and they adjust themselves to what is deemed acceptable to their roles within these places.
Commuter
- Working day example: alarm clock wakes you up, busy role of commuter, thrust into wage labour, and then back home required to perform the role of a parent/partner. Each different situation makes a series of unique demands upon the individual, to which they must conform, at the risk of castigation.
Schizo-analysis
- D and G set out this model for the social construction of identity and they also try to create a practical means by which individuals might reconfigure their own subjectives.
La Borde
- This was a radical clinic not to cure the mentally sick but to encourage the individual to participate in their own self-creation
- Schizo-analysis questioned the dominant modes of interpretation, emphasising the relations of power between analyst and analysand
- For freud, paternal relationships shape an infants emerging psyche. Tree-like model theory
- D and G note that psycho analysis is not only a theory but a practice of calculation and treatment
Psychoanalysis
The basic tenets of psychoanalysis include the following:
- human behavior, experience and cognition are largely determined by innate and irrational drives;
- those drives are largely unconscious;
- attempts to bring those drives into awareness meet psychological resistance in the form of defence mechanisms;
- beside the inherited constitution of personality, one's development is determined by events in early childhood;
- conflicts between conscious view of reality and unconscious (repressed) material can result in mental disturbances such as neurosis, neurotic traits, anxiety, depression etc.;
- the liberation from the effects of the unconscious material is achieved through bringing this material into the consciousness (via e.g. skilled guidance).
- Schizo-analysis aimed to remove such models
- For D and G, the fragmentation of the schizophrenic's connection with the world is a quelled attempt to engage it in new ways
Body Without Organs
- The concept of the body without organs describes a radical reduction of the bodily awareness down to an unordered state
Francis Bacon
- Bacon paints flesh and nerve
- Worked from photographs of the people he was painting and other images such as wild animals, images of diseased bodies, and more... These photographs are virtual layers of significance that shape the actual recognition of the person before the artist
- Body without organs
- Process allows one to break away from fixed identities
- Re-territorialise within new forms of identity
- “Is it really so sad and dangerous to be fed up with seeing with your eyes, breathing with your lungs, swallowing with your mouth, talking with your tongue, and [and] thinking with your brain. Why not walk on your head […] see through your skin, breathe through your belly. […] When psychoanalysis says “stop, find yourself again”, we should say instead, “Let's go still further, we haven't found our body without organs yet”.
Virtual/Actual
- Key themes for D and G are construction and contingency ( a future event or circumstance that is possible but cannot be predicted with certainty.)
- What something signifies to you could have been different
- This is because examples are based upon social formations and everything can change
- Meanings change, such as a banker being a respectable job but now the public considering them to be reckless
- The only certainty is difference
- The western tradition of thought is pre-occupied with identity
- Re-occurence of Baudillard's idea of reality - corroded by simulacrum
Mont Sant Victoire
- Everything is a construction made up of smaller components
- A mountain is a traditional notion of the real, as opposed to something imaginary or copied no longer holds
- Every object is only ever known from its given perspective
- These paintings seek to capture "a synthesis (refers to a combination of two or more entities that together form something new) of change and permanence."
- The paintings capture the structure of the mountains and the artists own perception of the scene, such as how things are ordered, how he perceived depth, his central visual focus...
- If we are to retain the notion of real it must be re-conceptualised
-
- The actual refers to states of affairs, bodies, and individuals, whilst the virtual refers to what these entities imply, and what in fact brings them into existence.
- A mountain is a traditional notion of the real, as opposed to something imaginary or copied no longer holds
- Every object is only ever known from its given perspective
- These paintings seek to capture "a synthesis (refers to a combination of two or more entities that together form something new) of change and permanence."
- The paintings capture the structure of the mountains and the artists own perception of the scene, such as how things are ordered, how he perceived depth, his central visual focus...
- If we are to retain the notion of real it must be re-conceptualised
-
- The actual refers to states of affairs, bodies, and individuals, whilst the virtual refers to what these entities imply, and what in fact brings them into existence.
Conclusion
Between creative rhizomatic constructions, social assemblages, individual re-programming, and questioning accepted notions of thought, Deleuze and Guattari developed a series of tools for strategic thought and action. These provide a set of tools for those who wish to challenge order that exists for its own sake, and a way of understanding how we today exist in relation to an ever changing, and ever more complicated modern world.
